Don’t Be Shameless!

Shame can be a debilitating condition. This is because shame doesn’t give people an “out”. Either I’m horrible and I must hide my horrible self, or else I lash out in rage against those who I feel have shamed me. Either way, the outcome is not pretty. But we still must face the fact that, as uncomfortable as it may make us feel to say it, shame plays an important role in our moral lives. How can we use this ugly emotion constructively and avoid its debilitating effects?

The trick, of course, is to provide people with a constructive way out of shame. In our society, we tend to experience shame an indictment on our whole self. I am a horrible person in your eyes, and cannot be otherwise. Our sense of shame is based on the idea that we, as persons, are fixed things. If I am a fixed thing, and I do something shameful, then I am a horrible person and have no way out of shame.

However, what happens if we think of ourselves not as fixed things but as processes that are always under development? What would happen if we were to think of ourselves as works in progress rather than as fixed personalities? Imagine that instead of thinking of yourself as either “good” or “bad”, that you thought of yourself as always striving to become better?

This is the way “out” of shame. This is how to turn the situations involving feelings of shame into more constructive experiences. The key is not so much to protect children from feelings of shame, as it is to help them find a path out of shame. “I understand that you may feel ashamed of yourself for pushing your sister down. You should feel ashamed of yourself! This is not how good brothers act toward their sisters! A good brother takes care of his younger sister, even if she…”

The prevailing wisdom in world of parenting is that a child should never be made to feel bad about him or herself. But that simply cannot be so. There are situations in which we want our children to feel bad about themselves. We don’t want our children to be shameless! The trick is to realize that there are destructive and constructive experiences of shame. Shame is destructive when it offers us no escape. Shame can be constructive when we are shown the way out. When children fail to live up the standards that we set for who they ought to be, showing them how to achieve those standards can turn shame into virtue.

In the old days, grandma might have said to us “shame on you!” But by saying this, she certainly didn’t mean, “You are a horrible and unworthy person!” What she meant was more like, “right now, you are acting like a bad person, but if you change your behavior you can become a good person”. Grandma was giving us an “out”. She was not so much saying “Your are a disgrace and cannot be otherwise” as much as she was saying, “Don’t be without shame! When you feel shame, use it for the purpose of self-improvement! Learn to be a good person.”


http://www.northshorefamilies.com/dont-be-shameless-why-good-people-feel-shame/

Wow